was called on the "Ridge Log," on one of the Twelve-Wheelers. We took water at Allen Junction. Two big tool boxes on the tank appeared in the dark to be flat with a plank between to stand on. I gave the water spout a good shove so it would lock in place and I stepped out on one of the boxes. It proved to be round on top. I pinwheeled over the side, grabbed the side of the tank with one hand, pulled myself back on the tender, and said nothing about it.

The odor of damp logs at Ridge was good, and we came back at dawn with a big box of blueberries on the running board. When we tied up at Two Harbors my hogger remarked, "When you're going to do those gymnastics off the tender you might let me know, so I can watch."

When I drew a Mikado, I was lucky. On my first trip with one I had a boomer brakeman who was familiar with Mikados on other roads, and he

taught me how to fire one. With good coal, one could carry a very thin fire which danced over the whole grate area, and it was beautiful to see. You almost had to stay on the deck, though, and feed it one scoop at a time.

Our first four Mikados came from Baldwin, Nos. 300-303. One of the new Mikados, the 302, was on the incoming track one morning with the left cylinder head blown out. This was repaired, the 2-8-2 made a trip on ore the same day, and I was marked up on her at 11:30 that night.

These engines were superheated and carried only 165 pounds pressure because valve oils to withstand higher superheat temperatures hadn't been developed. The Mikados had electric lights, air bell ringers and reverse, and Butterfly firedoors. The hook hung under the tank where it couldn't be reached.

For me, who was a little too short on one end, it was too far between the coal and the firedoor treadle. When my foot slipped off just as I was aiming a scoop of coal for a front corner, there was a bit of janitor work to do!

Vanderbilt tenders, carrying 15 tons of coal, were supposed to have about enough, without refilling, to make a round trip. But we didn't run fast enough to shake down the coal, and there was a solid irremovable wall between me and the coal and no good way to climb over and no time to do it. Tenders were later equipped with coal pushers.

For lack of steam we stalled on the grade up to Allen Junction. Next trip - same 302, same engineman, same grade we were 20 minutes ahead of the passenger at Aurora. Consultation: should we go ahead of No. 2 to Allen Junction? The engineman said, "We can make it if the tallowpot can keep her hot." I said, "Let's go." We made it in plenty of time.

After stopping one night behind another extra at Allen Junction my engineman left to walk forward to the lunchroom, saying, "You bring it in." A green tallowpot but too proud to admit it, I took over. How did I release the air? I remembered a phrase from a book I'd read years before: "Don't forget the kickoff." So I didn't. And I brought in the train.

My last train order on the D&IR I remember well, except for engine numbers. ENGINE

RUN EXTRA

THREE YEARS later, in 1916, my name was last on the list of tallowpots on the Duluth, Missabe & Northern. That honor entitled me to the least desirable job, which was working not on but around and below the ore docks at West Duluth. I had a room at Proctor, headquarters of the road, and my day started at 4:30 a.m. when the callboy routed me out of bed. After breakfast I waited in the yards for the next Mallet with empties dropping down to the docks.

I rode the engine going down, got off at the land end of the docks, and walked five or six blocks to pick up my engine a between-the-drivers Consolidation. Once we took 402, a passenger Pacific, down from the shops

de luxe commuting, with pay too. The work consisted, in part, of loading coal and taking it to the steel mills at Morgan Park near by. Once

we handled a shipload of manganese ore that was loaded and locked in box cars. We weighed it on the scales which were too short for a box car three times, the last time by spotting one end of one car on the scales, with the cars on each end uncoupled and moved away. A long job.

The air pump in our engine groaned horribly. This could be stopped for a brief time by putting a little valve oil in the top of the valve oil can, which just fitted over the air intake. When the pump inhaled, I slapped the cover

with the oil in it over the intake and the oil was sucked in. If my timing wasn't good, oil was spat all over me!

At 7 p.m., after a 12-hour day, I was waiting at the docks for the next train of empties up the hill. I tried for the caboose. The Mallets had stokers, but they didn't work too well, and if I were in the cab I might feel obliged to help the fireman. I'd already shoveled 6 or 8 tons of coal and I'd been up since 4:30 a.m. In railroad service, as in the Army, it pays to use your head. If I got a train within a few minutes, I had only an hour more until I got home in plenty of time to get up at 4:30 the next morning. That was the life!

The only 0-8-0 I ever worked on I fired one Sunday in the yards at Proctor. The occasion was notable only because the ashpan filled up and we had to crawl under and quickly drag the ash from below the grates with the hook. Burned grates were frowned on by the company.

One afternoon a hurry call came; the 309 was off the track across the St. Louis River in Wisconsin. We were to get the 306, which was in the roundhouse with only 40 pounds of steam on it, and take the Big Hook

over.

It took a long time to raise steam. The blower was weak. At 80 pounds we took her out over the table and got the wrecker.

From where the wrecker was work

ing in Wisconsin, the brakemen wanted to go down to the Northern Pacific crossing to get oil for their lanterns from the towerman, so I ran them down. Coming back I couldn't get my injector started, so I hurriedly shut, I thought, the lubricator valve. Instead I opened it wide and it was empty. We borrowed oil from the wrecker crew whose oil wasn't recorded. Railroading was full of pitfalls.

We left the 306 and took the Hook back to Proctor and the crippled 309 to the shops. I didn't know it then, but these two engines were to figure heavily in the balance of my railroading.

ENGINES of the Missabe in 1916 were huge Mallets, still compound and by now fitted with mechanical stokers. Some new Santa Fe's had mechanical stokers and grate shakers. The crossovers and wye curves were too short for these great engines and they wouldn't stay on the track. To avoid derailing, men with greasy rags on sticks lubricated the flange side of the rails on the wyes. Switches and crossovers which were too short were avoided if possible.

Nos. 319-350 were Consolidations with fireboxes over the drivers. By 1916 they had been fitted with generators and superheaters. The 300's, up to about 318, were 2-8-0's with between-the-drivers fireboxes, and they used saturated steam. There were perhaps three Pacifics and some smaller engines, Ten-Wheelers.

I caught the 332 for a turn of ore. My hoghead was, by reputation, a rapper. We left our empties and picked up 65 loads at the Hull Rust yard. Climbing out of Hull Rust without a helper was easy. I felt good, which was a mistake. When we got on the flat muskeg the "hemlock drag”we didn't drag. We did something like 45, and those little-wheeled Consolidations weren't built for that. The firedoor was too big and too close to the deck and to the grates. The terrific heat burned my overalls and my left foot through my shoe. Worked at too long a stroke, that short engine had a superheated exhaust that was fierce enough to give me a bad headache. When the engineman patted me on the shoulder and said, “That'll take her in," the words were sweet. Next day I was sent, much to my relief, to the north end.

The engines of my experience on the north end were the 306, a free steamer, and the 309. After the 306 had been sitting for hours, a few scoops of coal would raise immediate pressure. One I could have a thin fire of slack coal and still have plenty of steam. Once the draft very nearly cleaned the grates! The 309 was sluggish. She would heat up in time, and there was ample steam after the throttle was closed. She formed clinker quickly. A half hour after the fire had been cleaned the door would slam shut, showing that little draft was getting through the grates.

That fall my roustabout job nights was with the 306. The engineman was young and a fast-too fast runner. We delivered empties and picked up loads from a new open-pit mine. From the mine there was a curve where, when the track was new and stiff, one pair of drivers slipped off the rails three times in one day. Then we went through a bog where the

grade was filled each day and sank 6 inches or so each night. Rail went up a steep little hill, over a high trestle, and on across a stop-and-start Great Northern crossing (on which the only wheeled vehicle I remember seeing was a bicycle).

We joined the northbound main facing traffic just south of the Hull Rust yard. The loads had to be pulled over the switch - southbound over the northbound tracks and I was the flagman, since the two brakemen were back on the train. The only clue to a northbound train was light on the sky beyond the hill to the south. Sometimes an extra showed over the hill while we were on the main, and since there were no signals I had to run out, light a flare, and hop back on as quickly as possible.

Backing in always too fast - I would relay the lantern signals, which were on my side, to the runner. I was counting 50 car signals, which took a long time; and we rapidly closed the gap which ended in a long string of empties ahead on the track.

One dark night the conductor, who was walking down through the yards, asked us to pick him up when our work was done. With a caboose back of our tender, we backed much too fast down a track which looked clear to all of us. It wasn't. There were loads on it. Two brakemen were in the caboose. Fortunately, the conductor way down the track saw what was happening. He swung his lantern so hard that it went out, but the engineman saw it and stopped. It was a near thing. The brakemen could not possibly have survived.

This is a good place to say that the next year the Missabe started a safety campaign which was very effective, and cut reportable accidents to a fraction of the previous records.

October was usually a bad month for snow. Snow results in slippery rail— much more so than with rain — and when there is snow in the coal it won't slip off the scoop readily. Canvas was hung over the gangways and over the back of the cab. This had to be rolled up each time I put in a fire. As the weather got colder the check valve on one side had to be opened slightly to keep it and the water in the tank from freezing.

Early one morning a water glass broke as we were about to come in and tie up. The upper valve couldn't be closed entirely and filled the cab with steam and sound. The runner got a look at the steam gauge, which was going down rapidly, and he yelled at me to keep her hot. Which I did, but since you couldn't hear the pops, or see or hear the pet cocks to determine the water level, or for that mat

ter, call signals, we were at a real disadvantage. Anyway, the engineman remembered that he had had his injector on to test it when the glass broke, and was too sheepish to tell me. That was the reason the pressure had been going down. We were not losing enough steam to matter.

When the 306 had four broken staybolts in a group right in front of my seat we had to run her down to Proctor light one Sunday forenoon. The shop had her rebuilt and the 306 doubleheaded the local back that same night. They looked for me, but luckily I was at a vaudeville show in Duluth - my first entertainment in months.

Occasionally I fired the varnish. The passenger crew pulled in on the wye at Mitchell, making a straight air stop, leaving the air on the cars. Any engine working in the neighborhood grabbed the rear and ran the 2 miles to Hibbing, while the regular crew ate lunch and oiled around.

The schedule for the 2 miles to Hibbing was 4 minutes. This included a Great Northern crossing stop, a station stop (the station no longer exists, neither does passenger service), and a stop at the Winston Deare crossing. No engine built could haul six steel cars 2 miles with four starts and four stops in 4 minutes. But we tried, and ended up with little steam, fire, or water.

The mining companies at that time operated hundreds of 0-6-0 and 0-4-0 switchers which, because they were cleaner and blacker than our engines, were called Mudhens. They dragged

all of the ore out of the pits. None of the ore at that time, I think, was treated. It came out in ore cars and was placed on the tracks ready for the trip to the docks. One midnight we rode one of the Mudhens down into the pit for dinner as guests of the Oliver Mining Company. I proposed to stand on the gangway going down, but that was vetoed. I soon found out why. The apron, between engine and tender, worn to a knife edge, sometimes stood straight knife-edge up! That was the roughest track I ever rode over and it was used only for downbound movements.

For two weeks we hauled gravel out of the Hull Rust pit to help fill the previously mentioned bog. Johnson, my engineman, was easygoing. While we were loading flat cars with a steam shovel he would sit with his feet up on the air valve reading Westerns. Since we had to spot a car several times to load it, I would say, "Back up," and he would kick off the straight air with his foot; the cars would roll back. "That'll do." He'd kick it on again without looking up.

At the time a strike of enginemen was threatened, and the older men weren't interested. Those old hoggers would rather sit on an engine than anywhere else. But the point was that the men wanted a shorter workday. They got more pay.

I was worried about my status in case there was a strike, and I asked Johnson how to join the Brotherhood. He said, "I guess you asked the right man - I'm the secretary." And that's

all anyone ever said to me about the union. It carried me free - during the war, but afterwards it was too expensive as insurance or I might, even now, belong to the Firemen.

An engine crew who had been working together all fall carried out a two-man strike. The boarding house at Mitchell (it is still there) was nothing to boast about. I was furnished with a face towel from a chair car. It had the Missabe herald on it and was my only towel for a week. Jones was an engineer hired from the Grand Trunk Pacific. One evening he and his fireman objected to the meat at the boarding house, saying it was "dog meat." There was a little confusion here. What they meant was that the meat was fit only for dogs. But a dog had been killed in the yards the day before, so what the proprietor thought they implied you can guess. The two men went to Hibbing for dinner while the superintendent settled the strike.

On my last two days of railroading I fired for Jones on a little TenWheeler. It had exploded on the road some years before, blowing the boiler off the right of way without killing the engineer. He was, however, partially disabled and was roundhouse foreman at Proctor that year.

The injector on the Ten-Wheeler wouldn't work if the tank was less than half full, and there was a patch on the fire side of the crown sheet; but Jones could handle that engine. Where others would make two or three runs trying to push cars up onto the various coal docks, working water in the cylinders in the process, Jones pushed them up with no trouble at all. It was magic. Jones taught me how to fire an engine, working a light throttle. A few days more with him and I would have been a real fireman.

But I was called back to Proctor where, rather than catch a coldweather trip on one of the 2-8-0's (all of which needed attention from the shops), I laid off. By the time the ore season started in 1917 the First World War had started for us, and I never went back to railroad work.

OFTEN when I have spare time in a town I gravitate to the railroad yards. At Binghamton, N. Y., many years after the events I have been relating, I stood on an overpass watching an Erie milk train at the station below. An elderly man, no acquaintance of mine, stood near me. As the runner got the highball and opened the throttle, and that great Pacific blasted under the bridge, my companion turned to me and said simply, "She's gone." We were just a couple of nostalgic old rails. His remark was not intended to be prophetic, but it was. I